1. Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to systems, media, and methods of encoding and/or decoding an image, and more particularly, to a system, medium, and method of encoding a 4:4:4 image of H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt).
2. Description of the Related Art
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC FRExt includes a 4:4:4 profile. Here, the reference to 4:4:4: represents an equal level of sampling for each of three components, compared to alternative profiles such as a 4:2:0 MPEG profile where one component has a full sampling and the two remaining components are sub-sampled with half the depth in horizontal and vertical directions. Here, this H.264/MPEG-4 AVC FRExt 4:4:4 profile provides an encoding tool effective for dealing with a color space, such as, RGB, as well as a YCbCr 4:4:4 image, supports a high bit depth up to 12 bits per pixel, and enables lossless coding. In a YCbCr color space, Y denotes a luminance component and Cb and Cr denote chrominance components, with most information typically being represented in the Y component, which illustrates the advantage of conventional YCbCr approaches with the above mentioned reduced level of sampling for the Cb and Cr components. Conversely, in an RGB color space, information is evenly distributed in red (R), green (G), and blue (B). Here, YCbCr 4:4:4 similarly represents that the equal level of sampling resolutions of the luminance component and chrominance components of information are identical with each other, like RGB.
In an FRExt standardization, an RGB encoding technique, that is, residual color transform (RCT), has been developed. RCT is used to prevent degradation of image quality from occurring when an RGB color space is transformed into a corresponding YCbCr color space. Such RCT use produces excellent results in RGB encoding with respect to various high quality images and thus has been employed in FRExt. However, RCT needs to be enhanced, in order to increase the efficiency of FRExt 4:4:4 image encoding. Accordingly, embodiments of the present invention such drawbacks for increased efficiency.